RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto dropped this one first back in 2006. It was the third collaborative album between the ambient maestros and the third installment of V.I.R.U.S.'s five albums series. It was remastered last year and now gets served up as a reissue alongside three all-new pieces, namely 'City Radieuse', 'Veru 1', and 'Veru 2'. The first of those was written for a short cinematic essay in 2012. The album centres around the pano with padded bass and electronic frequencies adding extra depth and texture. It is another classic in their oeuvre.

Review: You had us at Sakamoto. Or rather you had us at "excerpts from Ryuichi Sakamoto's time working under Nippon Colombia's label, Better Days. First released in 1992, this 12-track compilation runs from tracks that appeared on the Japanese synth legend's debut album, Thousand Knives, first released in 1978, through to songs written with the iconic session group KYLYN, featuring celebrated guitar great Kazumi Watanabe. Ever the auteur, even if you didn't know this was Sakamoto in proper landmark mode, there's no chance the sounds here could really be confused for anyone or anything else. It's mature and intelligent, yet strangely - and typically - fun, childlike and a little cartoonish, sharing as much in common with experimental electronica that was emerging during the 1970s and 1980s as video game scores from the 1990s.

Review: Although widely celebrated as a pioneering and influential work, the original Japanese version of Ryuichi Sakamoto's third solo album, Hidari Ude No Yume, has long been hard-to-find. Helpfully We Want Sounds has secured the rights to reissue it in Europe, pairing the Yellow Magic Orchestra man's original set - complete with sung and spoken Japanese vocals - with a partner disc of entirely instrumental versions. Musically, it remains as vibrant and otherworldly as it did at the turn-of-the-80s, with the great Sakamoto combining elements of jazz, traditional Japanese music, new age, ambient and new-wave with rubbery synth-pop and proto-electro sounds. The fact that it still sounds like nothing else is not only proof of Sakamoto's genius, but also why you genuinely need it in your life.

Review: It's eerie, deeply atmospheric, littered with what feel like found noises and strange abstract tones, but then rooted in impressive levels of musicality, possessing just enough form and structure to move beyond sound installation into full blown movements.

Or at least that's the case with the first part of this double release, Garden of Shadows & Light (Part 1), which sees melody used in almost abstract ways to bring emotional responses out of the listener. Meanwhile, Part 2 takes us into submerged realms that may or may not have something to do with whales. If all this sounds pretty out there then it should, after all this is Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Toop's live performance from The Silver Building in London in 2018, where the former performed sat at and inside a piano, while the latter used bone conduction and vibration motors among other things. Eccentric and innovative.